Obama Audio Supporting Bad Loans

From the horses mouth....

And The Plot Thickens

Here's an article from MediaCircus.com that has some history of Obama's legal carreer. He sued Citibank to force them to make bad loans to people who could not afford them under the Community Reinvestment Act. The suit alleged Citibank was redlining.

Wake up people....connect the dots!!!

Watch the video in the previous post. It will make your head explode!

Obama Rakes In the Lobbyist $$ From Fannie/Freddie

Those contributions, however, are from the lobbyists who represented the failed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama, having been a Senator for a mere four years, out-received (to coin a new term) lobbyists dollars for even John Kerry who has been in the Senate for decades. Click the post title for the story from John Gibson at Fox News.

Some icing on the cake of incrimination: Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson in recent years were at the helm of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are both current advisers to and supporters of Barack Obama. Do we want a possible future President getting his economic advice from the very people who perpetrated this current financial mess on our country?

It's All In The Accounting

I've been hearing more and more about how the impending "bailout" could be avoided by simply changing some of the regulatory language for the industry. Currently they are under Mark to Market rules (warning - possibility of article induced dizzyness after reading linked Wikipedia page). This article from the L.A. Times has more of a laymen's description. This one from the Phoenix Business Journal has detail about the current (Tuesday 9/29/08) talk of easing the mark to market rule. The Times Online piece has some good historical background on the current situation.

It seems to me (IMH-uneducated-O), that if this bailout can be accomplished without costing taxpayers a trillion dollars, that should be the course to take.

Where Did This Financial Crisis Come From?

Essentially any and all Washington politicians are to blame for not really doing something before it was too late. However, we can specifically blame Bill Clinton. I know, I know, here comes the "Clinton hasn't been in office for eight years! Why do you always try to pin things on him" response.

Here's how the seed of this debacle was planted.

"...(This) crisis can trace its roots to Bill Clinton’s signature on legislation making it easier for minority constituents with bad credit to obtain mortgages. In 1995, he had his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, rewrite the lending rules for the Community Reinvestment Act, opening the flood gates of mortgage lending to unqualified borrowers.

This legislation, in effect, applied affirmative action to the lending industry, which is to say that the current crisis is NOT a “free market failure” but the result of socially engineered financial policy by the central government. The financial markets welcomed their new customers with open arms, fueling a real estate boom across the board.

These so-called “subprime mortgages,” which were offered at variable interest rates, were widely perceived as good investments. Investors used the high-risk instruments to secure assets in other markets fueling profits for investment banks and mortgage lenders. The subprime market thus expanded rapidly and the mortgage instruments were used by other firms as collateral for investments in stocks, commodities and the like.

Unfortunately, no one questioned the pell-mell regulatory system of oversight for these transactions until large cracks appeared in our economy’s foundation, the first being the collapse of Countrywide, the nation’s largest subprime lender. Then banks and mortgage lenders large and small began downsizing, dumping assets and closing their doors. Bear Stearns filed for bankruptcy. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, holders of trillions of dollars in mortgages, were bailed out with 200 billion taxpayer dollars. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and insurance giant AIG was given an $85-billion taxpayer prop to keep it solvent.

From an article at The Patriot Post by Mark Alexander